Touchscreen ebook takes on Amazon and Sony

Hanover: Despite gloomy predictions to the contrary, there are a few gadget gems at this year's CeBIT technology fair - but you have to hunt them down, as they're hidden among mice of every imaginable colour, keyboards you can take apart and put in your dishwasher, and tinny PC speakers that always seem to be blaring out Coldplay.

One of the most interesting is a new ebook from a Chinese outfit called Onyx Technologies. This team of technicians is looking for European backers to bring its three sizes of eBook, with 6-inch, 8-inch and 9.7-inch screens, to Europe.

Despite its unfortunate name, the Boox is a fun piece of kit, not least because its screens are touch-sensitive. Rumours suggest that Amazon is lining up a touchscreen for the Kindle 3, but neither the recently released Kindle 2 nor the Sony Reader come with touch technology. The Onyx team has forged ahead, setting up the Boox to serve as a scribble pad so you can annotate your books, highlight text and make notes with the stylus.

Each model comes with 512MB of onboard memory and a slot for SD/SDHC cards. Text is shown in 16-level greyscale, which is the same as the Kindle 2 but twice the contrast of the Sony Reader.

The Boox also pretty good connectivity options. While the Kindle can only download content via its US mobile network and the Reader is limited to a USB connection, Onyx's new ebooks can connect via wi-fi, 3G and GPRS. They also support a much wider range of publication formats, including ePub, JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, MP3, PDF and WAV. Multiple languages are supported, including traditional Chinese.

"We wanted to offer better support for a wider range of formats," DM Kim, an Onyx spokeswoman, said. She added that the company is "very busy" talking to a whole range of software and content providers to open up even more possibilities, and claimed that its list of supported formats grows by the day.

The hardware is varied too. Three designs were on display in Hannover, including one model with a long vertical clicker to the left of the screen, which was used to turn the page. Another model used more traditional up and down buttons on the side of the device, while the third featured a central scroll wheel on the front of the device. All three felt sturdy and pleasing to hold.

Kim said that more designs and more colours could be available before the Boox arrives on European shelves this summer. We'll do our best to get our hands on one and give you a more in-depth look.